My favorite thing about building your own computer. My biggest requirement for a new computer is that it's quiet. I don't care if it's got the best graphics, or processor, I want quiet. My friends that build their own have really good, fast machines, but damn they're mostly damn noisy. My Toshiba laptop isn't much better, honestly. If I hook it up to a monitor and anything even modestly processor/graphics intensive it's loud and overheats.

Pretty much any computer today with a mid-range gpu can do what I want a computer to do.

t3knomanser:Does anyone buy an all-in-one computer because they expect it to be upgradeable? I will never, ever understand why anyone gives a shiat about the fact that products obviously designed around a certain form-factor aren't user-serviceable.

I really don't understand why anybody cares about this, or why anybody pretends to be surprised.

I was going to reply that you probably either have so much disposable money that every time you want to upgrade, you just buy a new PC or that you have never worked in a PC repair shop so you are not aware of how many people fail to conceder future computing needs (needing more RAM or HDD space later). Not only that but the amount of computers less than three years old where components have failed and need to be replaced/RMA'd.

However, since the repair shop that I am the service manager at also repairs mobile devices (mainly iPhones, iPads, iPods and android smart phones) I happen to have a DeWalt D26960 Heat Gun which is used to heat up the glass/adhesive tape used on new iDevices and android phones. A little heat, a few plastic pry tools and a slow, steady hand then the glass will come off of the iMac pretty easily. Some of the Macbook Pros also use this adhesive tape instead of the magnet system so I've performed this repair before (mainly to remove and replace broken glass and/or broken LCDs on Macbook Pros)

Granted, not many tech shops do repairs on mobile devices nor do they have a heat gun, but if your shop has done any repair work for Macbooks in the last few years, repairing/upgrading this shouldn't be too difficult. Pain in the ass? Yes. Impossible? Not hardly.

This is an all-in-one form factor, not a desktop. If you wanted a computer that is easy to swap out hard drives on later I would suggest a PC with a Cooler Master case. If you wanted a computer that has an extremely low profile then I suggest an all-in-one.

T.rex:I think the matter of contention is that Apple will charge you an arm and a leg to get a unit with a huge hard drive and tons of RAM, when, really, the user could've made those same upgrades to a lower (but otherwise identical) unit for pennies on the dollar.

Its a scam.... They are forcing the consumer to buy the more expensive unit.

And this is why they deserve an anticompetition lawsuit. They are going out of their way to prevent 3rd party upgrades.

stonelotus:FinFangFark: t3knomanser: downstairs: Because hard drives and memory never fail?

The issue is: what's the MTBF. For memory, it's already pretty high. And with SSDs, you're getting into that neighborhood.

The only time I've ever had a RAM stick fail was when I gave it a good static shocking. It's been a long time since I've had a HDD failure of any stripe. Just going on raw probabilities: the chances of these parts failing when the product is outside of warranty and isn't due for replacement in some fashion is pretty slim.

Some of us buy a tower and keep it for decades, gradually upgrading parts like Theseus's ship. Most of us change over computers entirely every 2-5 years. I keep myself on a 3-ish year upgrade cycle. The MTBF for most parts is much larger than that.

So you've never experienced a HDD failure in all those years?

I've owned computers since 1987 (always had a PC but I've owned a few Apples over that time as well). I have had exactly one hard drive ever fail on me.

I've owned computers since 1991 and have had six hard drives fail on me over the years. Considering that I usually have never owned less than 3 computers at a time, all with multiple hard drives, this is problem doesn't crop up much.

That said, working in a repair shop, I happen to have at least 2-3 customer computers on my bench a week with bad, failed or failing drives.

Don't get me started. I spent months trying to solve a DPC latency issue on 2 FailienWare M17x's. Horrible machine, poor customer service. M11x was great though, rock solid and reliable. Too bad they discontinued that one... Now using a core i7 Macbook Air for most things. Building a cheap PC desktop for gaming.

Yeah. I bought Macs. And I've also built a dozen or so desktops, from the boring to sli'd water-cooled horrors. People who "pick a team" are farking retards who need to stop being poor and buy one of everything. And not everyone who buys a Mac is technologically impaired, just like not everyone who builds their own PC's is a neckbearded Aspie...

Bschott007:That said, working in a repair shop, I happen to have at least 2-3 customer computers on my bench a week with bad, failed or failing drives.

Curious: How many of those HDDs reside within desktops with those no-name off brand PSUs that either came with the budget case or from one of those shady-ass low-end 'entry level' computers? I swear once I swore off cheap-ass PSUs as even an option for lower cost builds my parts death count stats has plummeted, mind you parts have also just gotten more reliable in general too. Same goes for those god-awful 'green' drives, you certainly get what you pay for with them.

BumpInTheNight:Bschott007: That said, working in a repair shop, I happen to have at least 2-3 customer computers on my bench a week with bad, failed or failing drives.

Curious: How many of those HDDs reside within desktops with those no-name off brand PSUs that either came with the budget case or from one of those shady-ass low-end 'entry level' computers? I swear once I swore off cheap-ass PSUs as even an option for lower cost builds my parts death count stats has plummeted, mind you parts have also just gotten more reliable in general too. Same goes for those god-awful 'green' drives, you certainly get what you pay for with them.

Green drives are cheap and I use them to archive data. Once filled, I just remove the drive and store away.

BumpInTheNight:HeartBurnKid: I always wonder at the people who say shiat like that. I mean, it's not even hard to build a computer anymore. You don't worry about IRQs, or Master/Slave Drives, or any of that garbage; you just make sure your processor is on your motherboard's support list, and stick everything in the socket where it fits. It's like playing with Legos these days, except when you're done, you have a new computer.

I half agree on most and completely agree on the lego-like nature of it once you've got the parts. Its the getting the parts which is still a rather daunting task to anyone that isn't currently up to date on the trends and hardware available. What socket? What what's a socket? Okay Intel or AMD? Atom/Ion/real CPU? Is the ram you picked on the HCL for the motherboard? Oh you have to pick a motherboard too? What is this dual channel or triple channel or wtf quad channel? I wanna buy that Nvidia 610 because its cheaper and a higher number then a 580...what do you mean that's a bad idea? The fark is SLI? Oh cool I wanna do that. Oh that motherboard doesn't support it? Pick a different one. Does your ram pick still show up on that new one's HCL? Okay sweet now how am I going to overclock it? What you mean that CPU doesn't overclock? Fark.

Just a sampler of the depthly conversation you'll have with the first time system builder and yourself over a life time of computer hardware do-it-yourselfrism. But I wouldn't have it any other way :)

Well, yeah, but those are mostly questions of "what do you want it to do?", not "will it work"? A modern computer user/builder will never experience the sheer "joy" of dropping offline every time they move their mouse because their modem and their mouse happen to be on two COM ports that share the same IRQ.

And, TBH, I've been building systems for a decade and change now and never looked at a RAM HQL. Hell, RAM's another thing that's gotten so much easier lately; you used to have to worry about EDO and parity bits and everything else, now it just comes down to "DDR2 or DDR3?"

And it's about to get worse like this in the PC world, now that the next generation of Intel chips will only come pre-soldered to new motherboards.

As for Mac Pros, Apple hasn't given those a serious upgrade in a long time. They have the power of a 2- or 3-year old computer at this point. The lack of attention Apple has paid to the Mac Pro suggests that they might discontinue the model entirely.

asmodeus224:Oh noes! I can't open up my transmission and fix it very easily either! Why ?! WHAYYYYY!?

Seriously, if a harddrive dies, the problem isn't replacing it, it is recovering the data, the frigging hardware itself is nominal and i would just presume to bring it in to a tech shop and let them fuss with it, as does 99% of the world. If you have the time and patience to go knuckles deep into your computer, god bless ya, i don't have the time or the inclination.

/haven't opened a computer box since 1998 or so//don't miss it

You seem to imply that this isn't an issue for most generic Repair Shops out there. You are going to need a hotair gun that can hit a minimum of 700 degrees F to heat up that glass which will loosen up the glue on the double sided tape they are using to hold this glass onto the Mac. Not only are their shops out there that will not touch Macs, but for those that do Mac repairs there are not many that have a heat gun in shop. A blow drier set on high *might* work if you had 45 minutes to waste trying to get the glass heated enough.

Fact is, someone needs to get the HDD out of the Mac if they are going to try to do data recovery or if they have to send it out to a data recovery center (if the HDD is beyond software data recovery efforts). There are only two shops in my area that will touch a Mac (I don't consider the Geek Squad a real tech shop) and only one of those (my shop) will work on MacBook Pro glass/LCD repair and upgrades to this new iMac all-in-one.

The article clearly states there are iMac fans who have already been doing drive upgrades with this very line of products for years, so they might be surprised and they might care about this new design parameter.

Also, I'm pretty sure the dullards who are buying these just because they're absurdly simple aren't reading Ars teardown articles, so it really only is aimed at those tinkerers in the first place who would want to know this.

So... yea... not really sure what your point is.

Ars Teardown articles are also great for us who work at Repair shops. When a new model is brought in the shop and none of the techs have worked on it yet, Ars and PowerBookMedic.com are great sites to have bookmarked.

t3knomanser:Does anyone buy an all-in-one computer because they expect it to be upgradeable? I will never, ever understand why anyone gives a shiat about the fact that products obviously designed around a certain form-factor aren't user-serviceable.

I really don't understand why anybody cares about this, or why anybody pretends to be surprised.

Yes. They're called laptops and they seem to be sort of a thing these days. If you can swap the *DD in a laptop, a desktop has no excuse.

RAM you could almost give them the pass, but the storage? Yeah, those things never fail or need to have data retrieved when the the PSU or the motherboard or any of the other many non-serviceable components fail.

Rwa2play:NewWorldDan: I spent $500 at NewEgg for an awesome and completely upgradable PC with nearly the same specs as the iMac, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies. What kind of idiot spends $1500 for a low-end UGLY desktop PC? Oh, wait, it's a Mac. Nevermind. They've got the best marketing department in the world.

This.

STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE!

Some people prefer Windows. Some people prefer Linux. Some people prefer Mac OS. Some people who prefer the later are willing to pay a little more for the experience they prefer. Why would you care?

And while it's true that part of Apple's sales strategy seems to be replace rather than upgrade or repair, if your Mac is under warranty any replacement of drives or memory is somebody else's problem (you don't have open the box yourself), and if it's not under warranty, it's not that expensive to have someone with expertise (and the proper equipment) to do it for you.

As far as replacing parts go, it all comes down to time vs. money. I'd rather pay someone to crack open my Mac and put a new drive in than take the time to do it myself.

Full disclosure, part 1: I have a MacBook Pro that I just took in for service at the end of my 3-year extended warranty. I got a new hard drive (upgraded from 160GB to 500GB), a new optical drive (it was rattling), and a new battery - all covered. Very happy with Apple on this score.

Full disclosure, part 2: The home button on my iPod Touch stopped working. Apple Store said it would have to be replaced, but not to worry because if you replace it through their Genius Bar, it's not as expensive as buying it off the shelf. Instead, I took it to a phone repair place (called AppleNBerry) less than 2 miles from my home, where they fixed it in a couple hours for $50. Apple can suck a big green donkey dong on this score.

Full disclosure, part 3: I work in QA, and also own computers and devices running XP, W7, W8, ChromeOS, Unbutu, and Android.

100 Watt Walrus:Full disclosure, part 1: I have a MacBook Pro that I just took in for service at the end of my 3-year extended warranty. I got a new hard drive (upgraded from 160GB to 500GB), a new optical drive (it was rattling), and a new battery - all covered. Very happy with Apple on this score.

Point of clarification: The hard drive was chirping, and I'd received a "Service Battery" warning. They didn't just replace these things because the computer was 3 years old. Wear from normal usage, obviously, isn't covered by warranty.

HeartBurnKid:Well, yeah, but those are mostly questions of "what do you want it to do?", not "will it work"? A modern computer user/builder will never experience the sheer "joy" of dropping offline every time they move their mouse because their modem and their mouse happen to be on two COM ports that share the same IRQ.

And, TBH, I've been building systems for a decade and change now and never looked at a RAM HQL. Hell, RAM's another thing that's gotten so much easier lately; you used to have to worry a ...

Hehehe my first experience with an IRQ conflict was trying to figure out why my mouse movements would make the soundtrack in Comache 1 get all choppy :P I used to play fast and loose with ram vs the board maker's list of bribe offeringblessed manufacturers until I met Patriot, then it allll changed. Three sets of ram that situation ate alive, before I just shifted to 'not the cheapest deal', thank god that stuff is a commodity at this point, 16Gb for 50$? 32GB for 110$? Hahahah I'm making ramdisks again :P

BumpInTheNight:HeartBurnKid: Well, yeah, but those are mostly questions of "what do you want it to do?", not "will it work"? A modern computer user/builder will never experience the sheer "joy" of dropping offline every time they move their mouse because their modem and their mouse happen to be on two COM ports that share the same IRQ.

And, TBH, I've been building systems for a decade and change now and never looked at a RAM HQL. Hell, RAM's another thing that's gotten so much easier lately; you used to have to worry a ...

Hehehe my first experience with an IRQ conflict was trying to figure out why my mouse movements would make the soundtrack in Comache 1 get all choppy :P I used to play fast and loose with ram vs the board maker's list of bribe offeringblessed manufacturers until I met Patriot, then it allll changed. Three sets of ram that situation ate alive, before I just shifted to 'not the cheapest deal', thank god that stuff is a commodity at this point, 16Gb for 50$? 32GB for 110$? Hahahah I'm making ramdisks again :P

Well, I didn't say I just buy the cheapest RAM I can get. But I generally just get a brand with a decent reputation, and don't worry about whether it's on the HQL or not. Usually the difference in price is a couple of bucks anyway. Kingston, Crucial, and Corsair are my go-to RAM brands, and I've generally had good experiences with OCZ too.

dukeblue219:I think we get so used to talking with other tinkering, technie types that we grossly overestimate the amount of the population that really cares. I personally love to upgrade here and there, and would not want an iMac if I couldn't, but it's not 10% of the population that's upgrading their computers. I'll bet it's more like 0.1%. Seriously.

I think it's higher than that. I'm sure I'm not typical but I had 4 family members with aging macbooks in my house last christmas and I spent half a day cloning drives and swapping out 500GB 7200rpm drives for the 80GB 5400rpm POS drives as well as doubling their memory. It was fun and easy to do.

mccallcl:StrangeQ: People that actually know about computers shouldn't care about this since they would never buy a Mac to begin with.

In my experience, "knowing about computers" comprises a vast range of knowledge. Many people who I think know more than I do are Mac users. They're nice to use, and powerful once you get into the UNIX part. They also look nice, which if you're in front of it for 12 hours a day, several of which are spent in public, you appreciate.

A good friend of mine is a network engineer and all of his home machines are Macs. He finds them to be more stable and require less maintenance than a Windows machine. Given what he makes and how valuable his time is, I can see why he would have done it.

Many of my fellow musicians are all Mac-heads. Personally, I can't justify the cost of a Mac Pro. The base model is $2499. The same whitebox machine is almost $1000 less.

rooftop235:Well, supposed your hard drive fails after two years. Would you spend over a thousand dollars on a new rig or just spend a couple hundred on a replacement drive and reload it? There is no hand-me-down with this machine it seems. Unfortunate. But oh well, we shall see.

I might be wrong, but I think Macs can boot from an external drive connected via Thunderbolt.

So, if the built-in HDD fails, you can spend a couple hundred on a little box to sit on the desk next to it, and keep using the computer until that drive fails too.

Granted, you lose a lot of the aesthetic elegance of the all-in-one this way, but as everyone in this thread has shouted repeatedly, people who care about aesthetics are stupid.

This is the stupidest criticism in the world. Apple products are what they are - that's why I don't buy them. But it is also exactly why the millions of people who do buy them DO. They want it to work right out of the box, to be easy to use, to be good for social networking and media, and to be cool and stylish. They get that, at the expense of a relatively small amount of extra money. They are not any dumber than I am - they just want different things.

BumpInTheNight:HeartBurnKid: I always wonder at the people who say shiat like that. I mean, it's not even hard to build a computer anymore. You don't worry about IRQs, or Master/Slave Drives, or any of that garbage; you just make sure your processor is on your motherboard's support list, and stick everything in the socket where it fits. It's like playing with Legos these days, except when you're done, you have a new computer.

I half agree on most and completely agree on the lego-like nature of it once you've got the parts. Its the getting the parts which is still a rather daunting task to anyone that isn't currently up to date on the trends and hardware available. What socket? What what's a socket? Okay Intel or AMD? Atom/Ion/real CPU? Is the ram you picked on the HCL for the motherboard? Oh you have to pick a motherboard too? What is this dual channel or triple channel or wtf quad channel? I wanna buy that Nvidia 610 because its cheaper and a higher number then a 580...what do you mean that's a bad idea? The fark is SLI? Oh cool I wanna do that. Oh that motherboard doesn't support it? Pick a different one. Does your ram pick still show up on that new one's HCL? Okay sweet now how am I going to overclock it? What you mean that CPU doesn't overclock? Fark.

Just a sampler of the depthly conversation you'll have with the first time system builder and yourself over a life time of computer hardware do-it-yourselfrism. But I wouldn't have it any other way :)

The scary part is that some of call that sort of self-talk FUN.

\Too poor to buy a mac.\\First three computers were cobbled together from "rich" friends' castoffs.

The issue is: what's the MTBF. For memory, it's already pretty high. And with SSDs, you're getting into that neighborhood.

The only time I've ever had a RAM stick fail was when I gave it a good static shocking. It's been a long time since I've had a HDD failure of any stripe. Just going on raw probabilities: the chances of these parts failing when the product is outside of warranty and isn't due for replacement in some fashion is pretty slim.

Some of us buy a tower and keep it for decades, gradually upgrading parts like Theseus's ship. Most of us change over computers entirely every 2-5 years. I keep myself on a 3-ish year upgrade cycle. The MTBF for most parts is much larger than that.

just made a booking on Friday to have three iMacs hard-drives replaced due to a bad batch of drives

BraveNewCheneyWorld:If you backup that often, then you'll only be out of action for some time while the data is transferred. If you went with a raid 5 array, then you'd have no downtime when a drive fails. You'd just want to be sure to replace the failed drive as soon as possible. You'd need a raid 5 controller if your motherboard doesn't support it, and another drive to make it work.

With 1 TB SATA drives, and RAID 5, you are pretty much guaranteed data loss. Never use RAID 5. RAID-1 for two drives or RAID-10 for more is the gold standard.

finnished:BraveNewCheneyWorld:If you backup that often, then you'll only be out of action for some time while the data is transferred. If you went with a raid 5 array, then you'd have no downtime when a drive fails. You'd just want to be sure to replace the failed drive as soon as possible. You'd need a raid 5 controller if your motherboard doesn't support it, and another drive to make it work.

With 1 TB SATA drives, and RAID 5, you are pretty much guaranteed data loss. Never use RAID 5. RAID-1 for two drives or RAID-10 for more is the gold standard.

I am curious as to where that opinion comes from? Got any links about that?

BumpInTheNight:finnished: BraveNewCheneyWorld:If you backup that often, then you'll only be out of action for some time while the data is transferred. If you went with a raid 5 array, then you'd have no downtime when a drive fails. You'd just want to be sure to replace the failed drive as soon as possible. You'd need a raid 5 controller if your motherboard doesn't support it, and another drive to make it work.

With 1 TB SATA drives, and RAID 5, you are pretty much guaranteed data loss. Never use RAID 5. RAID-1 for two drives or RAID-10 for more is the gold standard.

I am curious as to where that opinion comes from? Got any links about that?

it is anecdotal. i can confirm though, ppl in my circle will never ever use 5 again after bad experiences.

I used to care about how closed Macs were, but I got over it. I kept upgrading about every 2 years anyways and I buy my machines spec'd out to what I want, so in the end, I couldn't care less and so on my last upgrade switched over to a 27" iMac with an additional 27" Thunderbolt display. For a long time Solaris and Linux guy working in a Windows shop, I enjoy having a UNIX machine at my fingertips again, so I'm here to stay. I still have the other hardware, but for the most part they're loaded with Debian now and, no, I don't have a Windows set up in a virtual machine or boot camp. Not missing it.

t3knomanser:FinFangFark: So you've never experienced a HDD failure in all those years?

Nope. Last HDD failure on a machine I owned was... um... 1999? I might have had one circa 2001.

namatad: THE FUNNIEST part about that whole statistics thing: some parts fail before the mean and some parts fail after the mean. For every person who has never had a problem, there is a person who has had a problem.

I do understand how statistics works. It's called an "acceptable rate of failure". And let's be honest, MTBF is usually not a normal distribution. First, there are usually two peaks: the parts that fail very early, and the parts that fail near the MTBF. Parts that fail early are covered by some kind of warranty. Between that point and the MTBF, you have a low rate of failure, increasing up the curve as you hit the MTBF. If the MTBF is large enough relative to the expected lifetime, the number of failures in production will be very low.

T.rex: Its a scam.... They are forcing the consumer to buy the more expensive unit.

It's not quite a scam. Apple certainly doesn't mind the fact that they get you to upgrade through them, but y'know what? I'm willing to bet that even before they went this route, most people doing upgrades did it through Apple. Your average user isn't going to install a RAM chip themselves. They're not going to swap a HDD.

So, yeah- Apple definitely appreciates the extra profit on the high-margin parts they upgrade with, but this really is driven by their design constraints, not their profit margins. Apple solders the RAM to the mainboard in their new line of MacBooks because it's cheaper and slimmer than a socket. And the market has responded: people prefer buying slimmer laptops to upgradeable laptops.

Whether this will translate to the desktop is an open question, but I think the sorts of people that would contemplate a Mac desktop are also the sorts of people who would appreciate the form factor.

Myself, if I were getting a desktop, I'd go for the big honkin' full tower, because the only reason to prefer a desktop is ports and upgradeability. Otherwise, I can't see a reason why I'd want a desktop when I could have a laptop instead.

I think you've got it backwards. Apple's design is driven by market capture tactics, not the other way around.

To wit, I just upgraded the RAM on my Samsung laptop. I opened a little door (one screw), pushed on the chips with my finger, they popped out. I stuck the new chips in, and closed the door. The HDD was right there next to the RAM. Could have replaced that too, just as easily.

Don't kid yourself. The ONLY reason Apple makes things like this difficult is money. They want to capture as much of the money that you spend on computing as possible. Period.

Personally, I find the lengths they will go to to do so insulting, so even if I liked their products, I'd never buy one.

That is the decade where I learned that non-standard proprietary systems suck. If something breaks, you either have it repaired or replaced with the same component. You pay a lot of money to end up with the same product.

Meanwhile in the PC compatible world, if something breaks, you can treat it as a forced upgrade. Toss the broken component for something better, sometimes for less than the cost of your old part.

I look at these new iMacs as nothing more than a disposable computer. If it breaks, you toss the whole thing and get a new one. Seems like an awful waste to me.

First thing I ever learned how to replace on my computer was the memory. The second was the hard drive. These are the basics, like being able to change your own tires. If you can't change a hard drive or memory yourself, you don't need to own a computer.